Cities should not pay for new stadiums
sites.lsa.umich.edu
sites.lsa.umich.edu
Giving money to football teams is not much of a step removed from putting it directly in the pockets of the already rich owners of the teams.
But this idea that opera is stuffy high culture is the same mistake people make with Shakespeare--it's pop culture, just removed from its context. Imagine upper-class twits a century from now screening an Adam Sandler movie.
These things ARE high culture today. Whether or not they were high culture when they were first produced doesn't change that in the slightest.
I could be wrong obviously, but I would be extremely surprised if Adam Sandler movies have centuries of longevity to them; I think even people who like his movies will acknowledge that they're not spectacular films.
Of course the "test of time" test isn't always an indicator of quality. There are plenty of old books that I had to read that I thought were terrible, and moreover there are plenty of modern music that I think is fantastic that no one else will really care about.
Today's superhero movies = yesterday's westerns. "I can't believe they made so many of these and just how bad most of them are."
I don't think that is historically accurate.
From what I've read "high" vs. "low" culture changes over time, very often based on aesthetics. Brahms wrote both high and low art by the late 19th-century audience's standards. Today it's all just Brahms, who is a "classical composer", hence all "high art."
Most importantly, there is no reason at all to believe that it cannot change again in the future. E.g., Brahms goes viral and gets treated as some kind of KPop sensation. Then we get some young punk doing cosplay as a steampunk Musikwissenschaftler claiming that Hungarian Dance No. 5 no longer slaps as high as it used to.
Sometimes you'd get someone singing pop tunes as arias, sometimes you'd see legit arias sung in full costume, sometimes just the local belting out of Carmen in sweatpants. It felt delightfully local, accessible, and devoid of highbrow/lowbrow nonsense.
But this is less true when the stadium is built and then surrounded with parking lots that you have to drive to to go park your car. It's more true when the stadium is built in a neighborhood or at least a walkable area.
Recently Columbus was going to lose the much beloved Columbus Crew soccer team. We had a stadium off of I-71 that was, you guessed it, surrounded by parking lots and not much else. You couldn't grab a beer before or after the game. People couldn't go camp out at a nearby bar and while you're not in the stadium you're close by and part of the atmosphere. Fortunately the state and local business leaders rallied together to #SavetheCrew and we were able to keep the team and we're building a new stadium next to Nationwide Arena in downtown Columbus where you can walk to the stadium. Hell, you can actually bike there from the suburbs using an existing bike trail and check-in your bike. Similarly, Ohio Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University is very walkable. People go and grab brunch before the noon game, they buy apparel, etc.
So I think that yea, a football team is likely to make money for the team owner and cities and governments should be weary of this. And I also haven't read the article so maybe the benefits I mentioned are washed away somehow, but I can't imagine Columbus without Ohio State football, Bluejackets hockey, or Crew soccer. I think it makes the city a better place, even if the owner (of the latter two) makes money.
The financial benefits are rarely worth the initial expense for professional sports stadiums.
Th article didn't claim governments shouldn't kick in any money, only that funding it wholly (or nearly so) via public funds is a bad use of tax revenue.
DC has two recent examples. Nationals Stadium (baseball) and Audi Field (soccer). Both in the same neighborhood downtown (southwest waterfront).
The baseballs stadium cost ~$1 billion. It was financed with bonds sold by the city and remains owned by the city. Rent to the baseball team and a portion of ticket/concession/etc are being used to pay back the bonds. As of a few years ago, it looked like the cost was basically a wash. But, that ignores opportunity costs of doing other things with that money (assuming it could be borrowed for other projects), so it's hard to say for sure if the stadium was better than other options.[1]
Audi Field's financing was quite a bit more complicated, with multiple land trades with 3rd parties, and mixed financing (the team paid a significant amount of construction costs). The team leases thee stadium for a nominal $1/year, so I have no idea how the city recoups it's investment. Part of that deal also pulled $30 million from public school funding, which seems like a big miss to me.[2]
All that said, the neighborhood where the stadiums are located was a derelict slum and industrial site before. It's massively revitalized. Does that development offset the costs of buildings/maintaining the stadiums? That's not clear. And both stadiums seem to have had a better mix of public/private financing than some of the NFL stadium deals of past decades (which are usually more expensive to start as well).
1 - https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/nats-park-billio...
One of the things you mentioned was opportunity cost. I wonder if cities such as Columbus or other similarly sized cities actually lack opportunities and so they always latch on to projects like these? Are there intangible benefits to having an NFL stadium that aren't realized in economic cost-benefit analysis? For example, while Columbus is similarly sized to Cleveland and Cincinnati, if you watch the news or weather channel they always choose to show both of those cities instead of Columbus, the capitol (I know the likely reason is just makes more sense to display both of those). Or if I travel I always have to say Columbus, Ohio instead of just Columbus. Not the case with Cincinnati or Cleveland. Is that because the name of those two cities is so unique, or because we don't have an NFL team to get name recognition? Does that affect investment opportunities when companies are considering locating an office? Are we not front of mind because of that? I don't know either way, but I also wonder how this could be measured and if it provides any economic value.
Maybe not apples to apples, but DC's annual operating budget is ~$17b vs Columbus's annual budget of $1b. This despite DC having a smaller population (~700k vs ~900k).
Also I think the Columbus population comparison isn't great (omg we're the 15th biggest city !11!) because the city has annexed places that really don't make a lot of sense. Metro population is better to use for a comparison. And then I think for D.C. in particular you have the federal government located there so it's probably just "different".
Indianapolis has a budget of around $1.3 billion [1], Columbus is $1.04 billion [2], and Cleveland has a budget of around $1.8 bn [3]
[1] https://www.indy.gov/activity/city-and-county-budget [2] https://www.columbus.gov/finance/financial-management-group/... [3] https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/02/mayor-bibbs-2022-budg....
Professional sports is incredibly lucrative, and college sports are incredibly lucrative for the coaching staff and some college administrators that don't have anything to do with it. I would much prefer tax money to go toward endeavors and projects that aren't completely self-sustaining and profitable, but until localities are legally prohibited from negotiating tax breaks in this manner, it's not going to happen.
There's a very simple solution to this issue.
Owner wants taxpayer money for the stadium? Taxpayer gets ownership in the franchise.
You're following the 'broken window' theory of economics, focusing on how breaking a window creates a job for a handyman. Of course when put this way you know it's ridiculous - but why? It's because it ignores the thing that the handyman could have done instead which must be foregone. Everything comes instead of something else.
If we build a stadium, we necessarily do so instead of a hospital, school, houses, etc or more abstractly we might be giving up haircuts, shoes and some amount of anything else. Money spent near the stadium in a bar isn't getting spend at some other business. All of the benefits of having a stadium come at the expense of giving up something else of greater-or-equal value elsewhere.
It's just hard to see this, because the benefits are concentrated in a single, highly-visible endeavor, and the costs are diffused throughout the rest of the economy.
> If we build a stadium, we necessarily do so instead of a hospital, school, houses,
Maybe as a global society this is true because of absolute capital allocation, but because people have the ability to allocate their own capital in the way that they would like to it's not a mutually exclusive endeavor. Further, building a new hospital, house, or school can be uneconomical and not necessary and also has the same issues you're highlighting. Building new housing for homeless people takes money away from special needs children etc... . It depends on the details and opportunities, so I'd disagree that this is necessarily true except in a specific example that we could analyze together.
> Money spent near the stadium in a bar isn't getting spend at some other business.
Yea that's fine. Both economically and morally.
If teams presented their cases more truthfully - this stadium won’t make any more money than other options, but the people of this city like sports, so please subsidize the rich owners- I would have less of an issue.
(Said from San Diego, where this former chargers fan is ecstatic to see the city didn’t kowtow to the team’s demands for a new stadium. They are now in LA, and I get 16 Sundays per year back into my life. )
Yea I mean they probably don't depict this in the best way possible, but undoubtedly it brings in tourists and other investment, at a minimum. But I think that this could also be used as an argument against, say, an airport because now people have easy access to travel to NYC, or Florida, or California and it diverts money spent from local entertainment to those cities/attractions/etc... Instead of spending money at MoMA in NYC why don't you spend it at the Columbus Art Museum? (I do say this to illustrate a point, but I actually agree we should spend money more locally).
I really wish we could get away from "XYZ rich owners" comments though because the government subsidies all sorts of people, rich or otherwise. Also it's not just the owners but the players too. They make millions upon millions of dollars. Intel coming to Columbus with tax breaks subsidizes the rich shareholders and CEO. The federal government maintaining a shipyard in New England subsidizes wealthy dock workers and the shipyard CEO. Roads? Same thing. Hospitals? Wealthy doctors. Wealthy defense contractors making bombs that our tax dollars are paying for to defend Ukraine from Russia. And you can play this game with any public investment or economic decision.
Your comment boils down to “all government spending on this list of items is equally inefficient, so why not build stadiums instead of airports.” I think that ignores the fact that airports are infrastructure, whereas sports are entertainment. Personally, I don’t think the govt should spend money on entertainment when the financial beneficiaries could easily cover the costs.
Also, in baseball, the owners are the last types of people I would support. They don’t even care all that much about the product on field - there is not a structural incentive to put a better product on the field. The comparison of billionaires to millionaires is also deceptive - that is a huge chasm, and players are being paid for producing value, using the income from their labor. Owners are paid because they have odd tax breaks (did you know they can depreciate their team purchase cost, despite team values consistently beating index returns?)
Lords of the realm is a great book to get insight into MLB owners.
Sorry, but I don't agree with this characterization. In response to your comment about bars and that a new bar at a new stadium diverting spend from previous bars this would apply to other things like commercial air travel which diverts local money to far away places.
Also civilizations have had entertainment for as long as they have existed. We need entertainment and it's quite critical to social stability and well-being as far as I know.
You're running away into pretty esoteric apples-Vs-oranges territory there. Compare local investments against other local investments, or if you're talking about a new communications hub, an airport against, say, a railway station. (Sheesh, didn't you even see how much like a cringe-worthy attempt at diversion that came across as?)
> I really wish we could get away from "XYZ rich owners" comments though because the government subsidies all sorts of people, rich or otherwise.
And I really wish we could get away from "Oh, those poor little rich owners" comments... The difference is that poor people need -- and (therefore), in many systems of ethics, "deserve" -- subsidies. Billionaires and gigacorps, not so much.
> And you can play this game with any public investment or economic decision.
Yeah, you can. But I wish you would stop.
There is a different, unrelated theory of similar/same name which might be what you were thinking of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory (this isn't what I was talking about)
"I don't think building a new stadium is analogous to breaking a window." It is, in the sense that building a stadium or repairing a window both require forgoing something else that could have been done instead.
"...it's not a mutually exclusive endeavor." It is most certainly mutually exclusive. If I person is going to spend an hour building a stadium, they will not be creating anything else with that hour or engaging in valuable leisure time.
If we pay (or tell/force) people to build a stadium - regardless of who pays (the owner, the public, a Genie) those people will have to NOT do whatever else they might have done.
This is just talking about opportunity cost then, not the Parable of the Broken Window.
> If we pay (or tell/force) people to build a stadium - regardless of who pays (the owner, the public, a Genie) those people will have to NOT do whatever else they might have done.
Yes, there are opportunity costs to the things we do. But this applies to anything, not just new stadiums. If you choose to buy a new computer or travel for a vacation or install a new toilet you could have been doing something else with that money. The key here is that in market economies (this is everybody, US, Norway, Japan, wherever) people are independent agents and can allocate their time and resources how they see fit.
Both versions exist independently. AFAIK the one intended to illustrate the fallacy of "Anything that increases GDP must be good!" is the older, by far.
The reductio-ad-absurdum version is that the glazier putting his sons or apprentices up to going out and smashing windows must be a net benefit for society...
I like tennis but I would not force you to subsidize its existence.
Yet, a significant portion of what you experience has been indirectly affected by these subsidies. I am willing to bet that opera has had a tremendous impact on the music you listen to, to keep a direct example.
Just arguing that "I don't immediately benefit from it, so I should not be paying for it" is probably a bit extreme.
But cities/states subsidize a lot of things from public transit to parks to parades to cultural venues to say nothing of schools out of taxes. To say all that should be completely privatized is, yes, an extreme position.
I was growing up in Calgary during the '88 Winter Games. As a child, it was pure excitement even though I wasn't particularly into sports. Somewhere in my parent's archive of my childhood are a couple of scrapbooks containing news clippings of what excited me from day to day, as well as the school's map to track the day-to-day progress of the torch relay. I don't know how I managed to snag that when a couple of hundred other kids and adults could have, but I did.
But this isn't to suggest that the excitement of the day is important. Roughly a decade later, I secured an IT job with a human performance lab at the University of Calgary. As much as I believe that professionalism in sport is contradictory to societal benefit, research related to improving physical performance is important. That was a legacy of the '88 Olympics. Sometimes outcomes are beneficial even though they are difficult to tally up.
As far as I can tell, the Vancouver games were beneficial as well. One of the outcomes was a mass transit line that reached capacity decades before anticipated. While that may sound like a negative, it does prove there is an underlying demand for reliable public transit. A more tangible benefit came from the conversion of Olympic facilities into community facilities. My recollections are of the a new False Creek community centre being used to host events to celebrate First Nations (North American Indian, for the Americans) culture and the dated Riley Park Community Centre being replaced with a modern facility. (I forget if the new facility included a pool, but the new rink was better than the old one.)
Overall, I would say that we should be funding facilities and programs that address the needs of society as a whole from a social perspective. That being said, properly planned funding of professional facilities can still serve that goal. While my example involved the Olympic Games, something similar could be said of facilities built for private interests. Provided the rent was in proportion to what is being offered and the facilities served the needs of other clients.
The recent Winter Olympics in Beijing used the swimming stadium from the 2012 Summer Games for curling. I assume they just put a floor over the pool(s?) with cooling loops in it, and possibly some of the machinery in the emptied pool itself. Maybe they did it the same way in Vancouver?
I am not a tennis enthusiast (actually, I hate tennis), yet I would suggest that there are good reasons to provide such funding. Encouraging participation in sport is a good thing. You don't have to agree with the particulars in order to agree with something in principle.
That said, I will agree that professional tennis (or opera, or football) should not be funded. For starters, it benefits a select few rather than society as a whole. Yes, that select few includes outside businesses who may see increased revenues or the people who may find jobs near the minimum wage and seasonal end of the spectrum. Granted, I have always been more favourable to the hope provided by social welfare (even when it doesn't work) than the cynicism of corporate subsidies (even when it does work), so don't treat my opinion as unbiased.
Superbowl viewership started at 18 million, hit 90 million in 1994, peaked in 2015 with 114 (true east coast/west coast game) and fell way down to 100 million or less starting in 2018. Correlation isn't causation, but there has been a pretty strong uptick in streaming media, and a similar decline in professional sports viewership, which has traditionally been on broadcast TV.
https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/super-bowl-ratings-historic...
Now that is a fantastic distillation of public goods as a concept.
Well goddamn done.
While we're at it why not extend that to all forms of user-pay and individual focused system?
* Why dont parents bear the full cost of their children?
* Why do we have publicly funded fire departments?
Etc.
As a society, for better or worse, we've decided we'd rather have a public good available to all than to make certain things only privately available.
Some things are good to have, even though they don't make money. There's a fun novella that parodies the opera mindset, called Maskerade:
“Who does the accounts?”
“All of us, really,” said Salzella.
“All of you?”
“Money gets put in, money gets taken out...” said Salzella vaguely. “Is it important?”
Bucket’s jaw dropped. “Is it important?”
“Because,” Salzella went on, smoothly, “opera doesn’t make money. Opera never makes money.”
“Good grief, man! Important? What’d I ever have achieved in the cheese business, I’d like to know, if I’d said that money wasn’t important?”
Salzella smiled humorlessly. “There are people out on the stage right now, sir,” he said, “who’d say that you would probably have made better cheeses.” He sighed, and leaned over the desk. “You see,” he said, “cheese does make money. And opera doesn’t. Opera’s what you spend money on.”
“But...what do you get out of it?”
“You get opera. You put money in, you see, and opera comes out,” said Salzella wearily.
They are largely unavailable to the general public unless they are willing to pay for exclusive use.
...Low blow man, low blow. Cats (the musical) is a lot of fun, and has some fantastic musical pieces.
A: T.S. Elephant.
Profitable against variable costs, not fixed + variable costs. Those shows are still receiving a taxpayer subsidy and in the vast majority of cities, wouldn't be performed in nearly as nice a building without it.
I work in this space, i actually rent performing arts centers of the kind you describe to put on conferences and have a decent understanding of the economics.
The vast majority of the costs for these arts organizations is the actual art. It’s the salaries for the opera and the cost of the paintings at the art museum and so on.
The actual buildings and complexes can and almost certainly are quite profitable when being used by outside parties like a touring Broadway show.
> I ... have a decent understanding of the economics
It's patently obvious there are fixed costs to a large building. Here are some fixed costs of the one I mentioned explicitly laid out:
> The Kennedy Center spends about $40 million annually to repair, renovate, operate, and maintain its buildings; these expenses are paid through federal funding.
It's clear you don't understand the economics as well as you think you do, so please don't condescend.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/kennedy-center-turns-50%2C-we-look-...
Have you been? It’s absolutely massive, it has multiple huge theatres and could sustain several large scale touring productions running concurrently. So our hypothetical Broadway production of Cats should be allocated a portion of those building expenses. And of course only the portion of the year they’re actually there. And of course they’ll sell tickets and either rent the venue or share the ticket revenue depending on how the event is presented.
Of course the Kennedy Center isn’t profitable, it’s not intended to be it’s basically a national monument on the mall.
But my point is that when you see Cats is in town that’s not where the money is going.
Why do you think $40MM is large number? The Kennedy Center has three theaters comprising around 6,000 seats. If you sell out every seat every night of the year for $100 a ticket that’s $219,000,000. You can pay for a couple furry costumes with that. Plus you’ve got the building the rest of the day, that’s only a few hour long production in the evenings.
Popular Broadway style touring productions, rock concerts, corporate product launches or broadcast takeovers (think Apple events or Jimmy Kimmel broadcasting from BAM in Brooklyn), conferences, auto shows, fashion launches, and so on, are subsidizing the performing arts center not the other way around.
Pocket change, says I!
Come on, it's absolutely a large number. Especially when added to the amortized construction costs of about $30M (a kind assumption, since it cost around $700M in current dollars to build).
> If you sell out every seat every night of the year for $100 a ticket that’s $219,000,000
...but they don't. I believe program revenue peaked at around $150M, although their site is down. The supposedly nonexistent fixed costs are almost half that!
> and so on, are subsidizing the performing arts center not the other way around
This is nonsensical in context. Counterhistorical nonexistence requires no subsidy, and these private tours choose the subsidized venue because it's the best deal for them. It's not charity.
Edit: I feel like I shouldn't have to say this, but obviously they also have to pay the producer for the show! There are also variable costs!
> supposedly nonexistent fixed costs are almost half that!
Indeed. Revenue in excess of costs is the definition of profitable.
> Counterhistorical nonexistence requires no subsidy, and these private tours choose the subsidized venue because it's the best deal for them.
Sometimes they do sometimes they don’t. There are also for profit venues operating in this space and the PAC’s are for the most part operating in a market rate environment when it comes to pop culture performances and events.
I’m just sure. I literally rented an opera house recently. PAC venues compete with hotels and for profit music venues like Livenation and AEG and event spaces for this business and and it’s generally a profitable arm of what they do.
They use the profits from pop culture and corporate stuff alongside the arts endowments, donations, and subsidies, to fund their fine arts mission.
Like Cats, for example.
Further, spaces like the Kennedy center (or amphitheaters) play a revolving set of shows which makes it difficult for any private entity to have enough skin in the game to fund it. If the stadium was owned by the city and rented to whichever group wanted it, that would be more analogous. But right now it's the X stadium, the sports team sells the naming rights, gets the revenue from other uses, etc. Instead, put them in a position where they can be outbid for the use during a home game and I might start agreeing.
It's really difficult to fund it when you have government backed competition which doesn't answer to the market.
I'm not sure if this applies to the Kennedy Center, but it certainly applies to the mega stadiums which double as concert venues that seem to be popping up around here. It would be impossible to compete against a government owned venue which will certainly have at least a conflict of interest in the development of supporting infrastructure and other legislation.
It's hard to get a large amphitheater going without government support. While I'm sure there are examples, but none spring to mind either currently or throughout history. But subsidizing live events of a revolving nature is different from subsidizing a billionaires sports team.
That's not how anything in America works. Billion dollar skyscrapers or complexes as private enterprises exist, often in the same jurisdiction as they stadiums.
This is exactly what capital markets are for and some capable and incentivized entrepreneur would acquire/develop such a venue and charge rental rates as applicable.
Unless I’m misunderstanding your point, you’re sort of indirectly advocating against grants for the arts. Is that accurate?
I know which of those two provides more value to society, and I think it's a fucking joke how art & music are not seen as things humans do like birds making a nest, but as something to commodify and court private investment with. We completely cut art and music from most curriculums in K-12 to afford budget cuts and what did we get out of them? Did you notice the extra fraction of a fraction of a penny this year on your return?
The reason private entities don't fund art is the same reason they don't fund public transit or worker pensions or guaranteed pay sick leave or... it's not profitable. I yearn for the day Americans are willing to support something regardless of how much money it makes them. Especially for a country that waxes so much poetic about its "moral majority".
Take any city of cosmopolitan reputation, and take away their public arts programs and presence, and I guarantee in a generation, they will wither out, as the prestige/tourist status and even business status will decline.
Take a city like San Jose where I live; smaller neighbors Oakland and SF have vibrant ecosystems between creatives and public works that fosters their reputations as places worth seeing. SJ has a small but active community that largely has to scrap for their own, such that its largely overlooked to the point that most of its best talent only gets known after it leaves for cities that will recognize them and provide tools an opptys for them (e.g. Cellista, Peanut Butter Wolf, etc). And even SF is pricing out creatives, such that many are booking for Oakland or out of state to continue.
The arts are poorly funded, and in the few places they do better, tends to be in old bunkers where socialites can 'invest'/launder their money and get a surname placed on a building.
I define the arts as things artist make.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+art+of+spiderman
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Matrix-Newmarket-Pictorial-Movieb...
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Ratatouille-Karen-Paik/dp/0811858...
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Sleeves-Album-Covers-Artists/dp/0...
https://www.amazon.com/Magazine-Power-Photography-Katherine-...
> only someone who mostly consumes art but doesn't create it says otherwise.
I've created art that has collectively sold to 20-30 million people. Have several titles to my name and have hundreds of artist friends making $70k-$150k + royalties across various industries. I can look at the credits list of any movie or video game and see hundreds, sometimes thousands more. Also have friends doing patreon, etsy, and youtube making a living making art.
"The Arts" are doing just fine.
And "artist" as "anyone who manages to sell some shit that doesn't fit into any other category", judging from your links?
Your reasoning feels just as wrong as the GP's.
No, you are doing fine. You are not the entirety of the space, but thanks for playing.
Pretty sure no one in the arts agrees with this. As a filmmaker I know I certainly don’t. What makes you say that? I’m curious where this opinion comes from.
Under a pure profit motive, the whole of art will converge around the best ROI, and spaces for new ways of expressing and perceiving will become narrow.
Sure it’s easier than ever to create and disseminate art, but also harder than ever to find art that isn’t streamed or commodified down your throat.
If for no other reason, some kind of non-corporate funding is needed so that new artistic outputs can generate a signal amongst mass produced art. Maybe that’s not the govt, but it sure ain’t MassMediaPublisherProducerCorp.
HN sneers about "voting against their own interest" when they do that.
This is unlike "musicals", which are protected by copyright, and are thus only run by the musical's rights-holder's licensed troupe(s), in a particular place (usually Broadway), with a particular interpretation of the material (the rights-holder's); where the revenues are due to high ticket prices that can be charged often only due to the artificially-created scarcity of performances of said musical due to IP law. (I.e. for many musical, nobody is going because they're fans of the particular actors/director/etc; they just wanted to see a performance of musical X, akin to what you'd get from seeing opera X. But there's only one available performance of a given musical X. Musical producers have a monopoly on performances of their musical.)
Musicals make money, by design. Opera does not make money, by design. Instead, opera houses take donations, in much the same way that you might imagine a "local open-source software development collective" might take donations.
When the people of a municipality get together and decide that they consider their local opera house a "local cultural institution" worth supporting with their tax money (usually only to prop it up in bad donation years), this does certainly make the opera house into a "government-backed" project. But in this case, the "government" here is just the mob-action of the people of the city. It's the atheist version of a church congregation agreeing that their tithes should be partly directed to some local needy cause.
Instead, things happen in a democracy because vocal minorities of constituents push for it, and nobody in the rest of the constituency cares enough to push in the opposite direction.
If a policy turns out to be disliked by the majority, the expectation is that the policy will rile up another vocal minority enough that they'll be inspired to come along and advocate to change things back in the other direction. If no vocal counter-minority ever forms, the policy stays.
To be clear, this isn't a corruption of the democratic process; rather, this is what it means to have a decision be made "democratically."
While that may be true from a purely economic stance, I am left to wonder how many people would want to live in a world truly devoid of the arts. I am not speaking of the stereotypical impression of the arts here. I am speaking of creative expression, whether it is linked to social discourse or not, arts here. Even though I am a bit of a fan of utilitarian and, arguably, industrial architecture, I am can also understand the human need for aesthetic and naturalistic environments.
I am all in favor of funding the arts in school, but I have to say every single art class I took in K-12 was absolutely useless. We learned neither art history, appreciation, or any technique of drawing or painting or anything of the sort, and none of my teachers (in an otherwise very good school district) honestly seemed like they would have been competent to teach drawing or painting or art history.
Basically my experience with art in school, as it was taught, was that it was an utter waste of time. I'd love to be able draw decently or have a knowledge of art history on par with say knowledge of European history.
OT, but if you are interested in learning to draw, read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/d...
And you can watch Music Hall for $50 or Operas/Ballets for $100. This are not crazy prices compared to a normal concert/stadium seat.
It's a huge difference, not a minor one, and not one divided by class like you imply.
And I'd bet every penny I have that the average opera or theater attendee is significantly up the class scale from the average high school football game attendee.
https://www.kennedy-center.org/globalassets/news-room/annual...
None of the federal money pays for expenses related to the actual programming and operations of the Kennedy Center, it pays for the building and grounds, which has a separate purpose as the federal memorial to JFK and is also used for a variety of public events and educational functions outside of the Center's performance arts programming. The parent comment asked why the government pays for opera (it doesn't, maybe through a modest NEA grant or something), not "Why does the federal government pay for federal monuments and public spaces?"
Is this a joke? Literally the first expense listed under federal appropriation is "Operations". In theory they don't pay the producers of shows with the same money that comes from the government. But given that operations and maintenance are necessary to hold performances, and money is fungible, the distinction is meaningless.
Wages for everyone involved are low, everyone in the industry is working side gigs, and without government help, the entire thing will collapse.
(I'm also unsure anyone actually enjoys Cats.)
There's a few profitable companies here and there, but they wouldn't exist without a large feeder ecosystem.
Source: my spouse worked in theatre for a decade.
I'm with you on "Cats" though.
The band, color guard, freshmen, and JV teams generally use that field as well. Many students attend games. Not to mention the fact that in many schools graduation happens on the football field.
"Actually, a fairly large percentage of people use it."
"Those people don't count because they've been conditioned to use it."
>it's there already
Doesn't change the fact that you'd need to pay for some alternative venue if it wasn't there.
> Not to mention the fact that in many schools graduation happens on the football field.
Maybe it's because I live where I live, but no high schools around me do this any more; it's all at local amphitheaters and the like.
[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/sports/highschool/article/T...
And in my experience, when the teams are not using the field, the public can use it (either it's open for e.g. walking/jogging, or it can be reserved for a group event or youth football, soccer, or other community events).
Curious where you go this idea. I don't have any evidence to back up my suspicion that this might not be correct, but wondering what yours is, too.
Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them. It is simple game theory. These businesses will go where the profit is. Any city or state that refuses to pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay. The best way to force that is with a federal ban.
> Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them. It is simple game theory. These businesses will go where the profit is. Any city or state that refuses pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay. The best way to force that is with a federal ban.
No. You can just...refuse to subsidize them. Seems to be working fine for Seattle, where IIRC the renovated stadium for their new NHL team was privately funded.
And if they do go somewhere else, what's the downside? Seattle lost its NBA team a while back, which was a bummer for basketball fans, obviously, but otherwise what was the harm to the city or region?
Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.
For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now, as everyone collectively woke up from the delusion that the Olympics were a major economic boon worth investing in. Sports team stadiums could easily go the same way.
edit:
Okay, obviously I should've picked different world cities as examples, but even taking those: Tokyo's pro sports teams don't have anywhere close to the foreign popularity that London's EPL teams do. Does that seem to hurt it?
Not that I disagree with the general gist, I had to facepalm at that!
I think the general risk is that a rival politician will promise to bring back sports teams, with some dodgy financial setup that conceals the true cost, and the electorate will gobble it up
I tried googling more directly for global popularity/famousness, but couldn't find any hard data.
And of course there's the issue of "has well known sports teams" vs "well known for their sports team". The former you could probably get data on somewhere, but the latter, I doubt it.
Travel outside the USA and every kid you meet has heard of Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. If I were French or Spanish rather than British, these kids would say PSG or Real Madrid instead.
The fans don't have as much money as Americans, but there are 10-15x as many followers on Facebook.
But I would argue England is well known for its sports teams rather than London. (There's also Manchester, Liverpool etc.)
I think what you mean by "travel outside the USA" might be "travel in Europe". I'd bet that you'd get more recognition of the Lakers in, say, China than any of those Premier League teams.
> But I would argue England is well known for its sports teams rather than London. (There's also Manchester, Liverpool etc.)
That's fair, those two cities are probably known for their football teams moreso than anything else.
Hard disagree on this one. It is in fact "outside the USA" because globally (not just in Europe), English Premier League teams like Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, etc. are extremely popular, especially in China.
> The National Basketball Association (NBA) has been named the most popular sports league in China in a recent survey undertaken by Ampere Analysis.
> Soccer’s English Premier League and Uefa Champions League ranked second and third respectively, in the report that conducted research with Chinese internet users.
So, the EPL is indeed popular there...but not as popular as the NBA.
Also, you see people wearing NY Yankees hats globally. Some of them don't even seem to know anything about baseball and just think it is some sort of NY merch. But still there are absolutely American sports teams that have recognizable brands more globally.
I may be out of date for China, I haven't been there for over 10 years.
My place of birth (in my passport) is an English city with a football team named after it. Outside Europe, in places with not so many tourists, it is very common for staff in hotels to recognize this and make some comment on it. Kids (and adults) who talk to me in the street will also comment on it — on the city's team if I say where I'm from, or with Manchester, Chelsea etc if I just say England/Britain.
I look up the names of the famous players before I travel to Africa or South America, so I don't seem like some ignorant idiot when hotel staff (or in one case, a border guard) open my passport and say "Thomas Partey! What a goal!".
Bear in mind the best European football teams often have a lot of foreign players. Chelsea currently have players from Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, France, Croatia, Belgium, USA, England (only 8/26), Senegal, Mococco and France. Arsenal add Ghana, Norway, Portugal, Japan, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Switzerland. Tottenham Argentina, Ireland, Korea, Colombia, Sweden, Uruguay.
Many people are aware when if a player from their country plays for a famous European team. They often also play for their national team, or used to.
(I have no interest in football myself, which is partly why it's so noticeable to me when people ask me about it so much.)
I'm also going to have to disagree on the Europe point.
South America, Mexico and Africa in particular are obsessed with football, and Russia, China and some parts of SEA are also huge football fans. Many of these will be well aware of the top British and Spanish football teams. On the other hand, basketball is also very popular in Asia so I don't know exactly how that would break.
You got any data on that? AFAIK lots of younger people have no idea what the Beatles were.
It's really not that hard.
> It's really not that hard.
Depends what you mean by football. The GP, for example, apparently meant actual foot-ball football, not American hand-egg. Does that change your assessment?
You are still forgetting a few continents. I know from experience that Central and South America complexity stop for Champions League finals.
I it’s quite possible that Liverpool is known more for The Beatles than football.
Instagram.
Arsenal (#38 from your list) has 21.9m followers and Dallas Cowboys (#1 from your list) has 3.9m followers.
But it's almost certainly not more popular than soccer.
At the very least WWE is not 6x as popular as the Dallas Cowboys.
Another example that occurred to me: I understand that American sports actually have regular breaks specifically to facilitate adverts. Whereas football (soccer) matches have two uninterrupted halves with a single 15 minute break in between.
British sports are completely orthogonal to American sports, so it seems a bit disingenuous to say that ‘no one visits London for sport’ from an American perspective. No Brit will go to the US to watch MLS. Americans care less about Soccer, Rugby and Cricket, but much of the rest of the world does.
London-based Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham are the 7th, 8th and 10th most valuable soccer teams worldwide. Chelsea won the champions league last year. All three teams play in Europe (almost) every year.
Wembley Stadium is the publicly funded national soccer stadium, and hosted the recent Euros final. It is a regular host of European club competition finals, including the Champions League.
Lords is the home of cricket. It hosted the World Cup final a few years ago, and is a mandatory stop on international tours. It almost causes diplomatic incidents if a tour of England skips Lords. London also has The Oval, traditional host to the last test of the summer. Accordingly, many famous test series have been won there.
Wimbledon is the most prestigious and historic tennis tournament in the world. It’s staunch traditionalism is polarising online, but it’s perpetually sold out, and ‘ground passes’ (a ticket to all the smaller courts) have queues for days. I’m an annual queue-er, I’ve met people from all continents.
All?!
I think you're undermining the rest of your argument (which I personally think is pretty decent) by defending the "sports in London/Paris/etc doesn't matter" angle so hard across multiple subthreads.
I actually believe that even on a back of the envelope calculation it's hard to imagine how one can come up with this being a net positive. Let's argue that a stadium brings in 1M visitors a year (which is a high number) . If a stadium costs 1B then the city (through taxes etc) needs to make around 100 per person for it to be a good investment (10% return). And we haven't even considered the costs of externalities, like large traffic jams during games, cleanup etc.. I find it difficult to imagine that this works.
> needs to make around 100 per person for it to be a good investment (10% return)
The goal of a government isn't to make a profit.
Living here and experiencing the carnage common after football matches, I can promise you that a shit load of international and domestic tourists come to watch football.
The US government actually does subsidize Marvel movies pretty heavily by giving them free/extremely cheap access to military equipment and personnel. Peace movements pretty heavily criticize these movies for this reason. See for example: https://www.cbr.com/captain-marvel-mcu-military-relationship...
Publicly financing a stadium in that setting might actually be a net positive (plenty of other factors) because all of the spectators are walking through the neighborhood with all the shops, restaurants and bars just to get to the stadium.
Baseball teams play 81 games per year in their stadium. American football teams play 8. That is also a huge difference. There are many stadiums that host both hockey and basketball and thus have 60-70 games per year - plus concerts and other events on top of that. Utilization matters! I don't know if they do anything in winter at Fenway Park, but at Wrigley Field there is a neighborhood ice rink in the winter time. The skate rental/lockers/bathrooms, warming station, concessions, and even Zamboni storage are all inside the stadium. Here's some rambling video showing what "hanging out at the stadium" looks like even when no sport is happening: https://youtu.be/-pgnR7FqkDo
If cities were getting huge economic benefits from their subsidies to pro sports teams, I probably wouldn't be complaining. It's the fact that they get little to no benefit from enormous investments that make the subsidies here dumb.
Stadiums have one use, and they're not generally available to everyone for other purposes at any time.
The studies on cities spending big on stadiums have been clear that the economic benefits are marginal at best, while the spending is big.
I dunno how big the benefits for the military are here, but they're probably not spending very much on letting movie makers borrow uniforms or use shots of F-35's in the background or whatever.
My point was supposed to be less about major world cities having famous teams and more about the impact of those teams on said cities. Okay, Tokyo doesn't have world-recognized sports teams the way London does. Does that seem to hurt it?
London has Chelsea, Arsenal, West Ham, Tottenham in the premier league. People come from all around to watch them play. I say this as someone who cares little about football.
Paris has Paris St Germain, who currently own two of the most recent top international players on the world stage.
Both cities also have lots of too-tier clubs from other sports, e.g. rugby.
These cities do have plenty of other attractions beside sports though to attract tourists and investment, so without these teams the cities would likely be fine.
But you might not know that about the most popular pro sport in the world.
> Seriously, though, if you are not into sports even slightly, why do you persist on making so many comments and statements about the popularity of sports and teams.
Why not? It's an interesting discussion, even if I'm not into watching pro sports.
I used to be on a torrent site that released edited versions of NFL games where they cut out all breaks, interruptions and uninteresting instant replays. The games were all under an hour and actually really fun and exciting to watch.
A city with a sports team benefits in numerous intangible ways. These teams serve as marketing for a city, both internationally and externally. It is a marker of quality for a city, a stamp of approval. They help contribute to a public identity of a city. There is value in having a communal identity. It unites people and helps them work together on more serious problems.
People also love following the local sports team. Yes, this is entertainment similar to other forms, but it can often be free. You don't need to buy tickets to a game to enjoy it. For example, every soldout NFL game is broadcast for free over-the-air in their local market. Marvel movies don't premier for free on the TV in my home.
It's amazing how twisted adult mindsets about sports are. Notice how not caring about watching pro sports teams is, in your mind, "not liking sports." As if the primary function of "sports" is to be watched, rather than, y'know, played.
> It is a marker of quality for a city, a stamp of approval.
I really don't think so. It's more likely that causation works the other way: cities that are successful tend to attract sports teams to take advantage of the local market.
Take Seattle: lost its NBA team, lost its NHL team until very recently. Was just found to be the most desirable city for new college grads anyway. Nobody's been thinking that Seattle sucks because they only had two of the four major US pro sports present in the region.
The way people frame and phrase things is quite revealing.
What are you talking about? I responded with multiple points. Look at the comment chain.
> It is ok if you don't like sports (which is obvious from your comments about Tokyo, London, and Paris which all have notably big sports cultures), but you don't have to pretend that other people don't find value in it.
Your comment would have been sooo much better if it hadn't started with a personal insult.
I am also not convinced about your argument there. I have no idea about what teams or even what kinds of sports teams those cities have, yet to me those cities are famous. I see little connection with a city's fame and sports in general except for rare circumstances. I may know for some cities that there also are sports teams, but I doubt those cities' fame was much changed by having them. I'm sure there's one or the other anecdote where a city became significantly more famous because of some team, but I doubt that this is even close to significant. For example, I think the German founder of SAP sponsored a local soccer team which let them buy a lot of to players, and with it he made an unknown town (and an unknown local team) kind of famous. That's not exactly the norm. Usually even such magnates prefer already well-known cities for their pet teams.
I'm not saying Tokyo, London, and Paris are famous only because of sports. That would be ridiculous. I am saying that sports is a part of their cultural identity. It provides unity to those cities. It helps attract people to those cities. Those cities are also historic. This effect is more prominent in cities with less history. For example, Buffalo and Rochester are two metro areas in New York of roughly equal size. I would bet that many Americans could tell you a lot more about Buffalo than Rochester and that is likely because of Buffalo's two professional sports teams.
A part of the reason why I live where I live is good access to live sports I'm interested in. Even within the city where I currently live, I chose the area in the city based on good transit options to the stadiums or decently close geographic distances. While it wouldn't be a deal breaker to move to a place where I don't have access to those live sports, it would be a part of the considerations on my move. And then its not even just the sports but also all the other events which go on at such stadiums and venues.
I wouldn't say Seattle sucks because they didn't have an NHL team, but it absolutely would have impacted my math on moving at least some amount and would have affected where I would have decided to live in Seattle or the surrounding area. Now that they are soon to have an NHL team again, I'm more likely to find it agreeable to move there. I wouldn't even consider myself a major sports fanatic.
Local governments do subsidize movie production with all sorts of funding and grants. In addition to the local population, many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums. This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.
>Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.
Ever heard of... - London: Arsenal, Chelsea, or Tottenham (Soccer), Wimbledon Championships (Tennis) - Paris: PSG (Soccer), French Open (Tennis)
Every major "high prestige world city" as you describe is a hub for multiple sports and various tournaments that invites both local and international crowds.
Which is dumb, though I don't think the stupidity quite reaches "city spends a billion dollars for one particular team" level.
> This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.
Again, the research on this is quite clear: the economic benefits there are meager at best.
> Ever heard of... - London: Arsenal, Chelsea, or Tottenham (Soccer), Wimbledon Championships (Tennis) - Paris: PSG (Soccer), French Open (Tennis)
I've heard of most of those, I guess I've just never heard of my friends or family going to see them, even though many have visited those cities (and myself as well).
If you look close enough, any spending that any governmental body does will have detractors. That's what happens when you spend someone else money.
From art to sports, to schools, to council housing, to foreign wars. There is always someone against it whose taxes end up supporting what they hate.
As opposed to American hand-egg.
* American Football
* Basketball
* Baseball
* Ice Hockey
Of which Ice Hockey is the only one really played outside of America (and I believe even that's mostly Canada which is basically America)
And why not city would ever fund a private team's stadium (like PSD or Tottenham), they do sometimes fund national stadiums (like Wembley)
Basketball is the second sport in Europe by number of participants, for sure.
Any references for that?
It's the second most popular team sport in most European countries, including the major ones. It's the second one even in England, despite low visibility and significant competition by sports that don't really exist elsewhere [0].
[0] https://www.skysports.com/more-sports/news/36244/12069769/ba...
These are the only hard figures I can find and it puts basketball behind cricket:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/899184/basketball-partic...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/899199/cricket-participa...
It's ahead of rugby union but about the same if combining with the league variant (ignoring recent covid years).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/899308/rugby-union-parti...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/899302/rugby-league-part...
Something to bear in mind when comparing it as a "team sport" is that it's not quite like for like. Basketball is much more accessible like tennis - it can be played casually with a couple of friends. A lot of homes will have a hoop in the garden or driveway.
Cricket and rugby will mostly be organised teams, dedicated pitches etc. If the question was "do you play in a local sports team" then I expect basketball to not be comparable. There might be more people playing with a frisbee in a park than are members of a local rugby team but calling it "a more popular sport than rugby" would feel misleading by failing to account for different level of commitment/organisation required.
Even in England, by participation rates it edges rugby, because it's the second sport in populous inner cities.
It does appear that basketball is very popular outside western Europe though, so I learned something today! It makes sense, I do enjoy basketball myself and think that a lot of sports in Europe persist on the weight of tradition moreso than their fun factor.
Here is just one example - http://www.bayareacricket.org/
The Nordic countries -- Finland is not in Scandinavia. Also Czechia, Slovakia, and perhaps Germany and Switzerland should also be counted. (Surely there can't be fewer hockey players there than there are baseball players in the Dominican Republic?)
Well, sorta. That statement is sufficiently true, but technically incorrect; it'd be a stretch to call Canadian and American football different sports entirely, but the differences, even if minor, are multitudinous enough to merit consideration.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_Can...
The most recent expansion team, Austin FC, sold out 100% of every home game in their inaugural season with an average of 20k+ attendees in a privately-funded city-owned stadium.
Also let's not forget about the USWNT who are the most successful team in international women's soccer.
Like a more sedate baseball but slower and longer
This is also the best sport to show in an office, because people don't watch anything but the wickets. I used to work on a trading floor where they showed it all day on a screen, no problem.
Oh speaking of tea, a thing non-Cricket-knowers might enjoy is that a cricket match will traditionally stop for "tea" during the game. Players will go into a pavilion, have some cakes and sandwiches then resume play a little later.
Not sure you’d wear that in NZ or Australia during the summer. Or maybe the purists would, strange game.
- Edward Abbey
For what it's worth (vanishingly little), I say that basketball is the most boring sport: everyone runs to one end of the court and somebody shoots and does or doesn't score, then everyone runs to the other end of the court and the same thing happens. This repeats until the last minute or so on the clock, which takes an unbounded amount of time to play because of fouls and free throws.
At least the college kids sometimes miss their shots. :)
Olympics (used to) disallow professional athletes in some team competitions. The US basketball dream team of '92 was so fabled b/c it was the 1st time to allow NBA players to partake. So in that regard Olympics don't really count as 'world champion' in pretty much any team sport event. 1980 hockey was no exception and featured "amateurs".
Where the definition of "amateurs" differed wildly depending on which side of the Iron Curtain you were from... Up to about 1985 the ice hockey World Championship was mostly about who would come second after the Soviet Union (usually Czechoslovakia). The Soviet Union's national team was largely identical to CSKA MOCKBA[1], whose players were all officers[2] who probably didn't do much else while on the clock than play, practice, or exercise for playing hockey.
___
[1]: Club Sport Krasnaja Armija, the Red Army Sports Club Moskva (Moscow)
[2]: Long-time goalkeeper Vyacheslav Tretyak ended up a full colonel, IIRC.
No. That makes them Olympic champions.
The world championship is an annual competition[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Hockey_World_Championships
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2016/nov/02/west-ham-...
I think the only other major team stadium involving government stuff in the UK was the Coventry Building Society Arena (previously the Ricoh Arena) that used to be partly owned by Coventry City Council alongside a charity. But that was more notable for a long rent dispute between Coventry City FC and the stadium owners and various threats to move / build new stadiums etc., so was presumably less of a gift to the team financially. It's now owned by the Wasps rugby team, who also ended up in some sort of rent dispute with Coventry City FC leading to them playing at Birmginham City's ground for a couple of years.
So people really believe this shit?
Brittney Griner, a mega star in the WBNA, is currently being detained in Russia on drug charges. What was she doing in Russia in the first place? She was there playing professional basketball for a Russian team. She makes a magnitude larger salary playing in Russia than she does in the WBNA.
Baseball is a major sport in Japan and the Caribbean. There's even an MLB team in Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organized_baseball_lea...
A game very similar to American football (Canadian football) has been played in Canada since the late 1800s.
This is typical reverse-American-exceptionalism sneering, where someone assumes that because something differs between the US and the few countries they’re familiar with (usually all in Northern and Western Europe), it must be unique to the US.
Baseball is one of the most popular sports in at least Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.
Basketball, sure. But:
> Baseball is one of the most popular sports in at least Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.
Where "at least" is also simultaneously "at most", AFAIK. Six is not exactly "many". And, hey, since you're writing from an American perspective, Cuba doesn't exist, so it's only five. And Venezuela? Four. Taiwan will probably be part of the PRC soon, so we're down to three... And how significant is the Dominican Republic, really, in a global perspective? So you're left with pretty much just Japan and South Korea. And are any teams from there even in the "World" Series?
So, sorry -- and yes, I'm from Northern Europe and everything -- but you guys really make this "typical reverse-American-exceptionalism sneering" all too easy all too often. :-)
I hear hockey is popular in Russia too, which is hardly “basically America.”
This is hilariously false. Baseball is wildly popular outside of the US, in particular in Japan and the Dominican Republic. Basketball is also incredibly popular outside the US.
Just because it's not soccer and the people aren't white doesn't mean it's not popular. By that same metric baseball isn't even that popular in the US.
This has been dis proven TONS of time,including in the parent link. Funding of sports stadiums DOES NOT increase economic activity enough to cover the costs
Sure, but when slg says the financials are settled, presumably they mean stadiums are a bad investment even when all such tangible benefits are taken into account.
The question is whether there are other intangible benefits - maybe a city with a sports team is happier; or has lower obesity; or an improved cultural life reduces brain drain; or the city can afford a mass transit system and needs one, but bundling it with a stadium breaks through some political deadlock; or it's just plain that voters support the stadium.
A theory of intangible benefits would also be helpful in explaining why cities keep on bidding for the olympics, which is otherwise hard to rationalise.
There was one bid for 2028 and one for 2032. Compare with 8+ bids in years past. There are fewer and fewer new cities that have never hosted before putting in bids (ostensibly due to insane construction costs/demands by the IOC). 3 out of 5 cities bidding for 2024 withdrew their bids and the other two got 2024 and 2028. 2032 seems to have gotten only one bid. What's happening is that this "intangible benefits" theory is dying as more and more of the world realizes that there are none. On the other hand the olympics and the world cup does seem like a good venue for authoritarian regimes to create spectacles.
Off the top of my head: recent Olympic host countries include Russia, China, and Brazil . World Cup hosts includes Russia, Brazil, and Qatar. Yup, checks out.
P.S. Ok, Brazil being in this list is debatable, as they are a democracy ... but with Bolsonaro in power I'll lump them in this group. Yes, I realize Bolsonaro wasn't in office for the Olympics or World Cup, or for the bidding process which happened many years earlier, but he's shitty enough that I'll take the editorial liberty of retroactively smearing his stain back in time.
P.P.S. Yeah, if you want to do the same with Trump in the US I guess I can't disagree either. But the US hasn't hosted an Olympics for 20 years or a World Cup for even longer.
The bidding procedure changed, one preferred bid is selected far earlier to avoid losers feeling frustrated and to lower costs.
Big cities tend to attract big sports, can't deny that, I just don't think the causation really works the other way, at least not strongly. How much would London or Paris suffer if they lost their big sports teams and events?
The article directly addressed this point by saying:
While counter-intuitive, tourism does not see an increase as the result of a sporting event, as often a similar amount would be spent by that city’s residents in a different city, thus creating no real net gain.
Now this may not be true for concerts or other events held in the stadium, but in general I think the idea is that the study indicates sports events don't generate significant tourism, instead drawing a primarily local crowd.
I would also argue that most people would have no issue(or minor issues) with local governments subsidizing _Some_ of the cost of a new stadium and other forms of entertainment. I think the issue comes in when the financial cost is extraordinary (> 1 billion USD).
It addressed this point for the US. It is a US centered article. Check all of the references. The data is US centric.
> While counter-intuitive, tourism does not see an increase as the result of a sporting event, as often a similar amount would be spent by that city’s residents in a different city, thus creating no real net gain.
True of the US maybe but not London or Paris.
Also, london does not fund a private team's stadium (like PSD or Tottenham), they do sometimes fund national stadiums (like Wembley).
Let’s stay on topic this article is about the US.
I'm having my trouble getting my head around this. That seems to say that a city WOULD benefit from the stadium because people would spend their money in a different city. I'm clearly not understanding it.
For example, I'm thinking of all of the people from Maine and NH that come to Boston to watch the Bruins play hockey. Without the team, they'd most likely not go to Boston, but might go to Manchester NH, or Portland ME instead. That's definitely not zero sum for the city of Boston or state of MA.
All that said, I also agree that cities and states shouldn't be providing the majority of funding for these types of facilities.
No, you're reading it backwards. It said:
>> tourism does NOT see an increase as the result of a sporting event
Which is a bit wrong in using the word "event". Sure, city revenues will increase from a home game -- but that evens out when local fans travel elsewhere to see an away game, and spend money there that they otherwise would have spent at home. OK, it works if you take "event" to mean a set of home + away games between two teams... But anyway, having a team that attracts some away fans and their money will logically give no net revenue increase to any one city, since presumably (and on average across all cities, as a mathematical certainty) all away fans spending money "here" are also local fans somewhere else, not spending that away-game money in their home town.
> For example, I'm thinking of all of the people from Maine and NH that come to Boston to watch the Bruins play hockey. Without the team, they'd most likely not go to Boston, but might go to Manchester NH, or Portland ME instead. That's definitely not zero sum for the city of Boston or state of MA.
A) So Bruins fans only watch home games? OK, maybe they're more travel-averse than fans of other teams in the league... But one would think most cities' fans are about equal in this respect, so on average just as much money is siphoned out of the greater Boston area for away games.
B) See that "greater Boston area" above? That's your "city", for the purposes of this discussion. That the "sports-fandom city" happens to stretch across municipalities and even states in your case is kind of irrelevant; in principle it's no different than rivalry between various districts within a city about where to put the stadium. Wherever you put it, of course the immediately surrounding area gets more of that revenue than areas further away. :: It is zero-sum for "the city of Boston" as defined by Bruins-fandom.
Looking at the study the umich study notes that stadium would little effect on net regional exports, which makes sense. However, that betters supports "governments shouldn't pay for stadiums" as a conclusion than narrowly defining it as "cities". That said, the fans come for the team more than they do for the stadium, and I agree with the conclusion that governments shouldn't be paying for these things.
My gut says you have the causal relationship here backwards. The lack of those teams wouldn't ding the city much, if at all.
In yet another example of why government intervention in markets is mostly to make them worse: the politicians in charge can’t help but build and spend the citizens’ money on flashy vanity projects. Public expenses, private profits. They’ll talk it up like it’s some big “civic” investment in Prestige with all sorts of abstract benefits, rather than just being a handout to the rich — and if you challenge them, well, they will correctly tell you that everybody does it!!!
The article refutes this point.
Did it really say "vacation"? I think they meant "travel" as in going to another city (say, in a chartered bus packed full of fans, and which goes back home afterwards) to see your team's away game; at least that kind of travel is what brings most of the out-of-town spectators -- who are what's under discussion here, right? -- to most of the big inter-city sports events I know of.
For that kind of "travel", going to see a regular game of some sport is the main objective.
But I know people who plan trips abroad, for instance from Helsinki (Finland) to Liverpool and Manchester (UK) etc, mainly to see football. Sure, going that far they do other stuff to -- visit team museums, for instance:-) -- but the matches are the backbone the rest of the journey is scheduled around. Maybe there aren't all that much fewer of that kind of people than there are fanatic foodies? I really don't know. But yeah, of course both categories are a drop in the ocean compared to ordinary tourists.
So what if City X gets some revenue from away-team fans when the City X Team has a home game? That only evens out with the revenue lost when the local fans go spend their money elsewhere on away games.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure German cities like Dortmund and Leverkusen are primarily known because of their soccer teams (at least among those who are into soccer, and that is a lot).
There are probably otherwise-sad US cities with decent pro sports teams that help bring name recognition...but does that actually translate into anything productive? The data on economic benefits seems to indicate the answer is 'no'.
Ehhhh... What?
I could follow your argument until this line but Paris and especially London are absolutely known for sport teams.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/sport/463098/chelsea-now-owned-by...
London-based club Chelsea has been front page news in the UK this week because its Russian owner (Roman Abramovich) has been targeted by sanctions imposed as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, throwing the future of the club (and its massively expensive players) into doubt. Some casual googling shows that this story has been covered by Fox News, Deutsche Welle in Germany, Italy 24 News and others
*least
People would have heard of London or Paris with or without their sports teams. Would you say the same of Manchester or Liverpool if their teams didn’t exist?
Not more, but independently of the cities. At least when the actual city isn't in the team's name: I had heard if Chelsea, Arsenal, and Tottenham long before I realised they're all from London. (Likewise, [Västra] Frölunda being from Göteborg.) And I'm still not quite sure about Crystal Palace and the Queen's Park Rangers... (Only recently I pieced together that Crystal Palace are probably named for the famous wrought-iron-and-glass building at the ~1850s World Exhibition, but I can't recall where that was. Probably also London?)
Wait, they are?
Googles Oh, they're from the London area. I didn't know that. Man, London is huge.
Genuine question: isn't it absurdly rude to respond to something somebody said in this way?
1) There are no new facts likely to come out any time soon & the situation is unlikely to change.
2) This is a question of public spending.
3) Joining dots, someone is being taxed to fund other people literally just entertaining themselves.
Eg, say I don't like team sports and there are some homeless people living nearby. Why should I be paying taxes for an uneconomic football stadium? The people who use the stadium can pay for it. If they can't afford it, it shouldn't be built. There are real problems in the world that are more important than people distracting themselves.
And from that perspective, downright contempt for pro-public-spending-on-stadiums seems a plausible position.
can't believe what i'm reading. go read some cold war history, or even pre-WW2 history.
Yes, the impact isn't zero, but I feel like the answer to the question of "How many people know about London" would change relatively little if you removed the pro sports teams.
But yeah I probably should've picked better examples. I think Tokyo works fine, Japan's pro baseball league doesn't have nearly the same global popularity as the EPL. Maybe Berlin? I lived in Munich and don't remember Berlin's football team, if they have one, really coming up much.
As already the old Romans knew: panem et circenses is what you need to keep your population from uprising - aka, providing them with food and entertainment.
> You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.
Movies, including blockbusters such as the MCU, are already subsidized. As for games - the European Union subsidizes developers since 2014[1], Germany runs an additional program since 2019 [2].
> For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now, as everyone collectively woke up from the delusion that the Olympics were a major economic boon worth investing in.
The subsidies for Olympic Games and FIFA World Cups were for a very long time mostly housing, public transport and the stadiums that were sustainably usable for many decades (just look at my home city of Munich if you want to see an example). Only after corruption took over decisionmaking and sponsors demanded special laws (e.g. in Brazil with beer [3]), liberal democracies decided to not participate in the racket, and so dictators bought their way in.
[1]: https://www.treffpunkteuropa.de/wie-die-eu-die-entwicklung-v...
[2]: https://www.bmvi.de/DE/Themen/Digitales/Computerspielefoerde...
[3]: https://www.t-online.de/sport/fussball/wm/id_53306408/fifa-v...
For example, it would be totally unacceptable to large parts of the country for Manchester United to go bankrupt and be sold off in parts as would happen in a normal business. I don't even really care and I think I'd find it outrageous too. The political sphere here is well aware of the value communities place on their FCs and protecting that system is commonly a part of political debate.
I feel like treating sports as a regular business is questionable. If we wouldn't allow a business to fail, it's not a real business, and looking at what literally just happened with Chelsea, it's clear we won't allow it to fail in the same way as a normal business.
You could say the same about monarchy, religion and, not long ago, smoking.
I couldn't care less about football. I doubt as many women care as men as well. "large parts of the country" can pay for their own shit.
Imagine a taxpayer bailout to support the settlement a paedophile is having to make.
Government subsidize movies and art for their cultural value.
This also works for the Green Bay Packers (American Football). To raise money for an upgrade / expansion of their stadium, they just issued more ownership certificates, and the fans of the team bought them. GB has a unique ownership model compared to the rest of the NFL though.
There are counter examples as well. The New York Yankees? The Dallas Cowboys? Toronto Maple Leafs? Take away the sports franchises from those cities and it would definitely be a huge economic and cultural hit to those cities.
Maybe the more apt example is Green Bay, a city that would otherwise be a total unknown. Mid-tier cities like Indianapolis as well. There's a number of other cities like Liverpool that are known for the Beatles and a sports team. For those cities, you can see why the mayor might think it's worthwhile to help out the local sports team. Nonetheless, it's still likely the case that it's really a waste of money.
Not disagreeing with your overall argument, but London is the home of several Premier League clubs, with Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham having global followings.
Paris has PSG, which is infamous for spending seemingly limitless money to bring in superstars like Messi, Neymar, Mbappe and others. Their ownership by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund is the subject of constant conversation among those who follow football.
Tokyo I will grant you. They have the baseball Tokyo Giants, but I don't think they are closely followed outside of Japan.
What a beautiful way to shoot down your own post, well done.
The state of Rhode Island burned a huge amount of cash on by funding a loan for a video game company. That didn't pan out.
But what I really want to know is who pays $200 for a sports ticket and $20 for a beer? There is money to be made hand over fist, but I just don’t understand why that is true at all. I’d rather not have these sports teams either if only for the traffic they generate on game days. But if you want to blame someone, blame the customers for this stuff, not the local government that is just giving them what they want.
Also, Tokyo is a really bad example of you are failing against prestige boondoggles. How many sky trees and Tokyo towers does the world really need?
Distracting and pacifying the populace with athletic spectacle is a trick governments have used for longer than history has existed. Major league sports are just the latest iteration in a long line of bread and circuses.
A sports team and a stadium have a very narrow appeal and is inaccessible to a large segment of the population either due to disinterest or lack of funds.
I get your gist here but I think it's pretty easy to make a distinction between these things. Even the most hardened Libertarian would agree that public spaces like parks are a net good.
You are kidding yourself if London and Paris are not known for sports. Baseball is big in Tokyo. Have you been to State de France? You think Wembly stadium, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham aren’t a global brands and icons?
Tokyo - 2020 Olympics
London - 2012 Olympics
Paris - 2024 Olympics
american top level sports teams are part of a multi-multi-billion industry.
this isn't getting together to build a library, it's a direct transfer of tax money to private companies that can or should easily afford to pay for it themselves.
christ alive.
It's hard to overstate just how important big teams like say, Chelsea or Barca are for a huge chunk of not just the people who live in their home cities but also across the world. How do you quantify that in terms of cost? It will obviously never happen but let's say barca wanted to leave Barcelona, do you think the city shouldn't do anything about it because it helps billionaires?
Tons of Arts museums, especially those for contemporary/avant garde arts are usually displaying private collections and in practice only benefit a very small minority of usually rich people. Operas and orchestras too. Shouldnt we just stop funding those too then? Where do we draw the line?
Here "important to" is equivalent to "liked/entertained by", as a form of entertainment. The question here is what forms of entertainment should tax payers pay for and your comparison with art museums, operas and orchestras is apt.
> let's say barca wanted to leave Barcelona, do you think the city shouldn't do anything about it because it helps billionaires?
If barca were extorting the city of Barcelona by demanding they pay 10s or 100s of millions to upgrade Camp Nou, then the city should tell the team to go to hell. This exact scenario has played out in multiple cities in the US and with the IOC and city bids.
Wait, what? Are you sure? I don't see a value of having sports teams other than entertainment.
> How do you quantity that value and should the government compensate the sports team for that value?
Maybe a good start would be to simply ask the people "how many sporting events have you been to in the last three months?"
If large numbers of people aren't that interested in sport now, they'll probably remain uninterested in the future.
OTOH, if large numbers of people are interested enough to go to games then they'll probably remain interested enough to go to games in the future.
My personal experience (not in the US), is that fewer than 1 in 20 people are interested in going to view live sporting events in a stadium.
At least in Europe, most teams have children organizations, and a lot of kids train. The sports provide motivation for the young kids to exercise and practice, watching high level plays is quite useful to learn tactics as well.
>how many sporting events have you been to in the last three months
It's COVID times, c'mon. Most events have no audience.
Good point: Why use tax dollars to build a stadium that is going to be mostly empty?
Let's wait to see if interest in sports pick up again.
Pro soccer might have something, but it's also a rounding error in the American pro sports landscape.
Gridiron football exists as Pop Warner or pee-wee leagues before the school systems take over in middle or high school. Little Leagues for baseball are typically shoestring operations sponsored by local businesses.
Where in Mississippi?
Entertainment is valuable!
Personally, I think the government spends money in a way that is foolish at best. If the money’s going to be wasted, at least spend it on something I like.
You need to argue why your entertainment should be paid for by tax money, while his entertainment should not.
You can't simply ask taxpayers to pay for your entertainment.
Of course you can ask! You can ask for any nonsensical thing you want! But, I'll grant you that it should ultimately be up to the voters to give the answer.
Also didn't Amazon get huge tax breaks to build FCs around the country?
https://www.georgia.org/industries/film-entertainment/georgi...
This is true of lots of places with large-ish film industries. I see similar things for Montreal, Phoenix, and other places.
I can't on the top of my head show any figures, but a classmate of mine that lived in the suburb with a stadium, a place everyone considered "the ghetto" because of crime rate, said it wasn't as bad as people said it to be; with the notable exception, and he was very clear about this:
when there's a football match going on in the new stadium close by, every family in the vicinity knew not to let their kids out (or go out on the night) because the city got too unsafe to walk around because of supporters/drunk hooligans trashing places and being violent. (risk of getting robbed, raped, assaulted went notably up every time there was a match that stretched in to the night)
The stadium to the locals felt like a net-negative. Bars and night life owners where happy, but to ordinary citizen it meant more crime, trashed streets, vandalized walls/shops + the immeasurable effect of the stereotype that got attached ("high concentration of immigrants = high crime rate")
But I guess it's worth it when you factor in that without security, football fans might trash the place and mess other people up like you describe.
However, I understand that those sport events are like a safety valve on a pressure cooker. It lets those aggressive members of the community to vent so they don't realize how fucked they are in their daily lives. It something like a pacifier for those people. It is bread and circuses, and the bread is getting smaller and smaller.
That said, if the local government is spending money on (pretty much private) stadiums, then I would postulate that they have too much money and the taxes are too high.
Even if we assume that to be true, you have to also look at the costs: providing the required transportation infrastructure, policing sports fans, cleaning up after them (including vandalism) etc. Making matters worse, the "utility" sports teams bring is limited to a few businesses (hotels, restaurants, pubs, shops selling merchandise etc.), while the costs are paid by the taxpayer, i.e. all residents.
I dont think sports teams should be treated as "critical infrastructure" and while you might be able to make the ethical case for Police, Fire, etc I am not sure how one would make an ethical case to use violence to fund a sports stadium
So not only do you ave a financial problem with stadiums, you have an ethical one as well
At the end of the day, Sports is not a proper function of government
My sides!
60% of Americans enjoy watching football according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1108544/american-footbal....
Even the 33% who strongly enjoy isn't a small minority. If a team decides to leave because the local city won't build them a stadium, it's very reasonable to think a majority of the local residents will be upset.
Depends on what side you are. On the receiving side or on the spending side. If you're in the Stadium's management, or you're a player for the team, you're about to get rich, and you can buy your next yacht or your 7th Ferrari. Ask me how I know. This also goes if you're a construction contractor, or a local politician(s) who signed off the project.
This is the side benefit of the "pooling the money" and usually the only benefit.
If they've build the stadium with their own money; I would be more than happy for them. Also the local population would be that much richer.
They may lose out on the chance to fork over millions (or billions) to a bunch of already crazily wealthy team owners, and maybe that means the stadium doesn't get built, or maybe it means that team leaves and market forces are such that if its a big enough city is makes economic sense for a new team to come in an build their own stadium (maybe not as glorious, but good enough to host games and sell tickets). Those millions (or billions) not gifted to the old team owner might be then spent on improving infrastructure or making better schools and parks and things that make a city nice to live making it even better off then before.
Remember when Amazon wanted all those perks from NYC to put offices there and then everyone was like 'no effing way' and so they backed down. Amazon still opened offices in NYC because it freakin' NYC. They never needed the incentives.
Why not let the teams crowdfund and build their own stadium like any other risky venture without capital?
I've always felt there was just too much money (and DoD involvement) in it for "we can take your people to the limits of human capability... purely for entertainment!" to make sense. Do they sell their private advances in sports medicine to defence contractors? Are they some kind of advertisement for super soldiers? If not, what's the gimmick?
I think we are looking at this the wrong way. I think cities should build and pay for these stadiums. However, it should come with express community benefit. During the off-season, it is a great place to do blood drives, have social service fairs, have people register to vote, have people vote (at a place that is built for high volume), run job training programs, run food drives/pantries, etc. Both the city and the players should be demanding this as part of the deal.
Running a government is also about winning reelection, which means raising money, which means not pissing off the richest people in your area who also have a giant built-in loudspeaker in the form of the current stadium, team, etc.
At this point, publicly-funded stadiums largely amount to bribery. We'll let you keep your cushy elected position if you give us a few hundred million in public money and help us keep up the facade that this was for the public good.
That's what capital markets and entrepreneurs are for.
Governments are about fixing broken economic games (such as tragedy of the commons, to cite a single example).
Or a way to punish politicians who sign contracts like this.
One of the issues that is that a mayor or whatever can be elected to a single term then indefinitely sign away the keys to the city.
Either punish the people responsible, or give governments inherent "fuck you" clauses that allows them to back out of terrible contracts or bonds without penalty. Yeah, it makes lending more expensive. But the current system has massive loopholes that are being exploited.
Since 2011 the Rose Bowl game on Jan 1 has been on ESPN. So two colleges, the majority of which have been public schools, play in a public stadium and the locals can't even watch for free.
I think at the very least they need to make a law that says all events that take place in a publicly funded stadium need to be broadcast on a free local channel that reaches all of the taxpayers who paid for the stadium.
But they’ve gotten more lax about that after they realized that the trick doesn’t work — blackouts don’t really increase attendance.
Sometimes a local entity (city, owner of the team, local businessman) would buy blocks of 10k+ tickets to ensure it could be shown locally.
The only channels I can receive from my house are PBS and Univision. 15 years ago I could receive NBC, ABC, and FOX. FOX never converted to ATSC; NBC converted, but at laughably low power -- if you live on top of a hill and have a high-gain antenna you can pull NBC in with only occasional dropouts. I'm not sure what happened to ABC.
I don't have cable, but for those who do, it was for at least 3 years impossible to watch the local baseball team on cable, because the team's channel was part-owned by one cable company, but our town has a different cable company. Unsurprisingly they struggled to come to a licensing agreement.
It's such a short sighted policy. Every kid I grew up with was a Raiders, Dallas, SF fan because they couldn't be a Patriots fan.
What a great way to alienate millions so you can sell 60000 tickets. Every thing these leagues due is tied to an rooted in stupid television contracts that are getting more and more irrelevant.
This would inevitably result in everyone seeing it for free. If you send it, we can capture it, and redistribute it.
First off, all of these events are already being broadcast on ESPN. So if people were going to steal the stream, they're already doing it.
And secondly, I know some very competent engineers who have no idea how to get pirated content, nor any desire to learn, despite being perfectly able to do so. And then there are they laypeople who not only don't want to learn but probably aren't even capable of doing it if they did learn.
They just don't want to spend any mental space on it. If they can pay to watch they will, and if they can't they won't.
In the Buffalo Bills example from the OP article, it sounds like they're attempting to negotiate directly with the governor. Smart, I suppose, since if the other examples are any indication, the elected official will be more receptive towards giving them money than the taxpayers.
[0]: https://reason.com/2021/11/05/voters-dont-want-to-pay-for-yo...
Keep in mind that the Governor of New York[0] is from Buffalo. I'd imagine that might make a difference.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Hochul#Early_life_and_ed...
Few billion dollars later, construction everywhere, and the Rams are playing their first game. There are only two families remaining out of the 30 that lived here. Rent went up and everyone had to move out east, to a worst neighborhood.
Sure we have a stadium now. But the neighborhood has been completely gentrified.
>When the Rams chose Inglewood as their new home, my apartment complex roared like thunder. It's like we had just won the Superbowl. There was literally fireworks exploding at my door and everyone was happy.
The case I knew from my hometown was that the Church (as in country organization) payed one third. The congregation hat to pay one third as well and the secular municipality also had to pay one third.
In Munich the "Allianz Arena" (named after a big insurance company) for the FC Bayern was also substantially supported by the tax payer. More than one third of the estimated costs were planned to be payed by the government. As they cannot subsidize directly that was mostly the cost of the infrastructure like streets, power, water and so on. The richest socker club in Germany argued that the tax payer has to finance it, as the city would profit from the visitors.
If I remember correctly, BMW got 150 million subsidiaries (from the EU and Germany) for building a new production site near Leipzig as it was seen as helping the development of the former GDR states after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Seems like a regular thing at any scale for any organization/company with enough lobbying power and influence.
The lack of institutional separation of church and state within Germany surprised me when I lived there. The populace isn't particularly religious on a personal level, but they tolerate a surprising amount of religious interference or intertwining with state institutions. IIRC there are church schools/daycares that are publicly funded as well, and of course the state cooperates with churches for religious taxation (yes, really -- if you're a member of one of those churches, you can't opt out short of leaving that church, they take the money directly out of your paycheck).
If the stadium had been built in the south bay, SF might today be saying, "Whew, we really dodged a bullet there", and meanwhile Twitter and Dropbox and Uber and Airbnb would all be headquartered in Santa Clara county and giving them all their employees' tax revenue.
Rather (like in Baltimore and San Diego), the new stadium revitalized a neighborhood whose original reason for being had mostly dried up, bringing enough business to support the (re)emergence of nearby restaurants and other amenities, and those investments in the neighborhood made it an attractive place to have offices that eventually became the new primary source of support for the restaurants, condos, hotel, etc.
The stadium was what broke the neighborhood out of the chicken-and-egg quandary.
The area around Levi's Stadium didn't really have much latent potential waiting to be unleashed.
This is part of why I stepped away from sports couldn't be happier.
They enrich the owners and drain the locals. I lived in downtown St. Louis when the Cards were in the World Series (2011) and the benefit to local restaurants + bars was minimal. There'd be a flood of traffic to get to the stadium, and another flood out - very little spillover to local bars and restaurants around the stadium. (Not none, but not the rosy picture painted when they talk about driving business to local establishments, either.)
Sure, we have that Metaface company, a few little robin hoods, and those people who venture onto the sand dunes.
But where can two teams of world class hackers fight it out to the finish? Nowhere, I tell you!
There is some underused land in Bedwell Bayfront Park, at the end of Marsh Road.
It gets a few hikers, some ham radio people on Field Day, and not much else?
We can build our Hackerdome there, and insure that hackers will always be welcome to compete in Menlo Park!
All we need is your support and your tax dollars. Vote YES to support the Hackerdome!
No, you need a physical space.
This is why it is so important to have public funding for the Hackerdome. We need a place where two teams of hackers can compete to see who is the best, and who should go down in shame.
And we can do it all under standardized conditions.
This is too important to leave to the private market. Vote YES now!
I've got analog bass that'll make you cry and enough compute power to model some pretty weird shit. I'm not sure if I'm a world class hacker, but I think the venue should be looking more at folks who win demoscene compos than top 40 acts. Maybe get top 40 acts to work with demoscene cats.
I'm also not as good as those folks but I'm fine with tipping my hand here and see if anyone else is thinking the same thing. I've got a plan and the tools! Lets go.
That's Proposition 1337 then?
Ive been dying for covid to be over forever so I can start going to triple A baseball games. Id rather watch semi-normal humans play than a bunch of millionaires.
I find it weird this happens in the US, where there is such an emphasis on not providing things other countries may see as a state function (healthcare, public transport...). It's not just the US of course, but it seems to be most apparent there.
- You have poor shitty neighborhoods
- Subsidize building of a stadium in said shithole, and watch the dollars come in.
- You’ll have increased commerce and development of surrounding area with ample employment for said shitty neighborhood residents.
We don’t need recent history to post mortem this, they figured out it actually doesn’t improve the region much a long time ago.
———
The only thing that reasonably works is gentrification, but, well, you know … that’s racist. How do you solve it? I don’t know, white people seem to have the money. We have to start much higher up to root cause analyze this, and while I’m annoyed by wokeness, root causing this kind of more or less leads us to ‘why the fuck are there so many white people with money’?.
Anyways, stadiums. It’s just a bug way down the ladder.
Have fun going to Yankee Stadium in the middle of the fucking South Bronx. Utopian shit never works.
John Oliver made a much better case than I ever could in a HN comment. It also answers "why do the white people have so much money" question.
Dissolve that. Give credit score amnesty. Those house loans will be flying off the shelves if we ever did that.
But nah, let’s focus on the guys that majored in Trombone or Classics at a private school for 25k a year.
It’s technically cheaper for tax payers since credit defaults are usually sold to collections for pennies on the dollar. That seems way more affordable, and gives a proper tabula rasa (versus a 1000 stimulus check). We’ll just subsidize the collections payments which usually settle for way less anyway, and just free people up. We should technically do the same for student debt. Have these dumbass schools send the debt to collections, and we’ll pay the stupid 10 cents on the dollar. Fuck off and never over charge again. Why would we actually pay off the full ridiculous amount?
But like, cities do all sorts of things that aren't economically sound. Who am I to say what they should do? If the taxpayers/voters/etc want to spend their money on a stadium, that's fine, as long as they know it's unlikely to make economic sense. Large stadiums are a prestige project, and those often don't make a lot of economic sense (and sometimes don't meet any of their other goals, either).
A voter and a taxpayer? I mean, sure, like everything (hopefully) it's subject to democratic forces and what the local people want. But there's endless debate over what the state should and shouldn't get involved in. I and my vote, (not that I am eligible right now, as a recent migrant) think this falls on the "shouldn't" side, where community facilities, public transport etc fall more on the "should" side.
> as long as they know it's unlikely to make economic sense
I guess that's the thing - is it made abundantly clear that these things are likely to be a net negative? That those of us not into sports are going to be footing the bill equally and not benefiting from and side-effects? Perhaps it should be more so.
Provide free public transport?
Provide better health care to the residents? Heck, how about just providing health care!
Provide bountiful resources to schools to improve education?
Oh, wait a sec, I forgot. Those suggestions are things which are economically sound. Sorry, my mistake.
I wish this was demanded more when cities pay for stadiums. I mean the rink where our pro hockey team plays is used all the time by local youth hockey and figure skating teams. The stadium where our pro football team plays is basically always empty outside of those few hours a few times a year when there is an actual game.
Around here, we've got a parks district for sport infrastructure. And a county transit authority for transport. Health care would be probably through the county health department. And the schools are through the school board.
So, the city couldn't do any of those things even if it wanted to. Of course, my city also is way too small for a pro sports arena, which is part of why I selected to live here.
You're a citizen who can argue for it.
Of course ultimately, cities are democracies and can decide to give away money to private sports teams, I'm not gonna dispute their right to do so.
But I'll definitely argue that it's really dumb to do that.
Removes tongue from cheek
That’s not to say the government should also have to pay, but the idea of sports teams acting like any other consumer of commercial real estate is clearly off.
To my mind the sports team would also have to pay for the infrastructure improvements etc and knock-on costs too. But then I really have little time for professional sports!
Looks more like they are less good at hiding it or don't need to. In the town's around here the cities usually bail out the sport teams after they go bankrupt (and thus don't) or put the stadiums into massive infrastructure plans so it gets murky how much was spent on it with public funds. Fortunately the trend seems to go towards letting the football (original, not the US version) clubs drown in their own mess more and more but it's far from over.
Also it isn't even in the same ballpark between bailing out a club that's in debt and getting the club in return, and building new a stadium for a billion or more USD, and getting hope in return.
While I understand the community idea, it's still a small minority what you are talking about (at least here, I can't speak for elsewhere like Italy). For the revenue part: most revenue is generated by club sponsoring and not ticket sales. There are a few stadiums which can break even due to renting it out to whomever wants it, againt the will of the clubs from what I precieve.
Then again you might be correct it is a common net positive, but I haven't seen any studies comparing it to the cost of not having one and/or provinding other means of entertainment so it might actually be offset if the population "using" it, directly or indirectly, is large enough.
Panem et circences is still a thing.
Note since bailing out is not actually a good term to describe it: with bailing out the city (almost) never gets the club. It al kinds of messy but generally it's a rent free loan or some other cost negative solution like buying the stadium but renting it out for free... In my opinion sinking money into a bottomless pit is the same if done after or before the fact.
For what it's worth, both association football (from whence, 'assoc' -> 'soccer') and gridiron football (which American and Canadian football are variants of) emerged at about the same time, during the mid-19th century. It would incorrect to refer to soccer as the 'original' for this reason, although they, along with a few other sports such as rugby and Australian football, descend from games that were played in this period in which the rules were still not yet set in stone.
We (Hungary) are spending huge amounts of public money on building stadiums everywhere (dozens and dozens of them). On the linked picture you can see a large-ish stadium built in a small town with a population of 2000 people. The marked place is the house of our prime minister :D He likes soccer.
I am interested to know the actual net effect of FIFA World Cup 2026 for example, but the post doesn’t seem to focus much on basketball, hockey, soccer, or baseball.
One is the problem that governments make investments, and private firms are the primary beneficiaries. This exists broadly. In some instances, it feels fine. Governments are supposed to make investments that benefit the economy. Roads, ports, fiber, etc.
This gets sticky when it's a select group, monopoly or cabal that gets most of the benefit. Many national or regional postal systems currently have this dilemma. Postal systems need major public investment to keep up with modern e-commerce. AMZN & BABA, the world richest firms, are the main beneficiaries.
The point at which people seem to stop and challenge is often when things get explicit. Sports stadiums are that. Team owners make explicit demands, or threaten local polities. That gets people upset.
Imo, the only way to deal with these is returning "hardball" tactics. Make hard demands, like control of key assets (eg the team's brand/IP) in return for investments. Threaten financial ruin of owners' investments back. Legislate away contractual lock-ins.
No one likes to be strongarmed. That's why people are so infuriated by "give us money or we take your team."
Here's the schedule at NRG Park, the stadium where the Houston Texans play.
https://www.nrgpark.com/event-calendar/
They're currently hosting the Houston Rodeo and have pretty big concerts every night for the next few days after already having events every night for the few days before. There's literally a massive rodeo going on on the grounds around it and in it. Then there's a large auto auction, then a lot of other shows going on. There's 21 days of events going on in the next 46 days, meaning something is going on in that stadium ~46% of the time in the next month and a half.
Take a look at how full the calendar is for American Airlines Center, the stadium where the Dallas Stars (NHL) and Dallas Mavericks (NBA) play.
https://www.americanairlinescenter.com/events
Once again, a lot of things going on separate from both teams, and that's while both teams are actively playing season games as well!
These stadiums aren't just for a single sport.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1LDjTgMEGU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMQsYENfWJ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5x3ECFemvk
"If the economic benefits of the proposed development turn out to be as the mayor suggests, he would be the first mayor in the history of such projects to be correctly predict the effects."
The beneficiaries of these projects never end up being who the backers say they will be. And the beneficiaries who they actually are designed for are never the ones being touted.
If economic benefit for the city were the motivation, let the developers put up their money to pay the difference if the economic benefits don't turn out to be as they projected.
I've been an athlete and enjoyed being on travel teams, and those experiences helped me develop as a person, so I'm not saying sports arent useful training, but I have a hard time justifying the whole student body paying for those kids to run around.
Cities need to invest in community sport and facilities for community sport. Yes there is also an infrastructure or building aspect to this but not giant stadiums. That is families, kids, tens playing (add sport of your choice). Cities should support those clubs that do this kind of work which is often shouldered by volunteers.
Once it gets to stadiums that are used by clubs with payed players. It is a business and the business should pay for it.
We've seen this happen time and time again.
I wonder how viable government regulation around this would be, to effectively ban the concept of moving a sports club by making the barriers to moving so high that no one would ever want to do it unless the team was in genuine financial distress.
So benefits that are absolutely standard like universal healthcare, employment protection, minimum holidays, parental leave etc. are very limited.
Meanwhile the government builds stadiums for commercial sports businesses, runs airports and harbours so that commercial airlines and shipping lines can use them, implements strict protectionist legislation even in industries which operate fine in other 1st world countries without such legislation, and local authorities offer massive tax breaks to try and attract companies.
The alternative is spending money on image campaigns and other fluff marketing. Once you realize that every time a city is (positively) mentionen in news, it is "earned media", the whole calcuation shifts a lot around.
But to what end? Thanks to sport I know of lots of US cities like Green Bay, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City etc. that I might not otherwise ever have given any thought. But what is the next step after that? I'm certainly not going to holiday there because they have a pretty good (or used to be good) team I've heard of.
The name recognition is not going to be the core decision point for someone to spend holidays there or relocate there.
But if you are relocating to a city and have three to choose from where non stands out in particular you might assume that the one with the stronger sports team is more vibrant or dynamic than the others.
It’s up to the people of a city how much they want to spend and on what.
Sports happen to be very popular with a large group of people who aren’t interested in the rest of what a city spends on. You can have those people watching sports or you can have them complaining about the rest of the spending because they didn’t get their piece of the pie.
People who buy things like season tickets pay for most of the rest of the money the city wastes, why not get some back?
It would be nice if there was more transparency ("Buffalo will pay for the stadium because we know you live the Bills one million times more than all your elected officials put together") or if cities banded together against paying these bribes but that's life.
I did really like the ideas for federal level reforms, but one component the author missed is that a stadium has workforce with a fairly unique composition. If you replace it with an office park or museum will they need dozens of hot dog and beer vendors, a massive athletic training staff, a landscaping staff, outdoor lighting technicians, etc? These are working class or middle class people who will be scrambling for a limited job pool. Getting rid of 100 janitors and adding 100 web developers has a cost to it, because it will require 200 people to either move or retrain.
Further, stadiums are often used for more than just sports. They're a venue for concerts, fireworks shows, and many other things.
Because if a sports stadium was, you know, profitable then there would be businesses tripping over themselves to build them with private money. Instead, it becomes a big lobbying game where a bunch of bigshots all skim money from everybody.
The Chargers were a great bad example with idiocies like not televising a game locally if the tickets didn't sell out and the city having to backstop some number of tickets. San Diego finally managed to kick them to the curb and good riddance.
I no fan of Los Angeles, but I'm sorry that Dean Spanos and his cronies infested LA after we kicked him out.
Many cities have votes on these things. The city I left didn’t fund stadiums, but wasted money on all sorts of other crap.
You can always vote with your feet. You don’t have to pay for a stadium if you don’t want to.
Because it's a poor use of public funds to directly subsidize private profit of one particular company/team.
Major sports organizations and franchises are rich enough to handle their own expenses, they don't actually need public help. They'll take it if they can get it, of course, because why wouldn't they? It's free money! But we're under no obligation to give it to them.
> Voters in Denver, Colorado, approved ballot measures on Tuesday authorizing the city government to issue bonds to spruce up parks, renovate homeless shelters, and upgrade public transit.
> They rejected just one portion of Mayor Michael Hancock's five-part, $450 million bond proposal: the one that would have directed $190 million of that borrowing toward the construction of a new multi-use stadium near the city's hip River North neighborhood. While the first four parts of Hancock's proposal won support from at least 60 percent of voters, 58 percent rejected the stadium subsidy, according to The Denver Post's election tracker.
> ...
> Meanwhile, 65 percent of voters in Augusta, Georgia, rejected a similar bond issue that would have seen the city take on debt to fund the construction of a $235 million stadium for a yet-to-be-determined future occupant (possibly a minor league hockey team). The cost of the new stadium was projected to add about $100 to the average property tax bill in the city—all to create "a handful of new permanent jobs," according to The Augusta Chronicle. Who wouldn't vote for that?
> But voters in Augusta might not have the final say on whether their wallets get raided for the project. Brad Usry, vice chairman of the county authority that would run the new stadium, told the Chronicle last month that a "no" vote would "only delay the project so the authority can find other means of funding it."
> So voters were asked to give their approval for the stadium project, but rejecting it apparently doesn't count? Cool democracy you have there, Augusta.
https://reason.com/2021/11/05/voters-dont-want-to-pay-for-yo...
On the other hand, it seems like this deal with the Buffalo Bills is being decided by the governor, rather than a public referendum.
> Since the founding of America, its people and its economy have moved steadily westwards and, later, southwards. Recently, people and businesses have flocked to Sun Belt states, while cities in America’s old industrial heartland are struggling. What makes American cities boom and bust?
they give the example of Pittsburgh investing in "Eds and Meds" -- education and healthcare -- to regrow the city's economy after the decline of steel manufacturing
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/checks-and-balance-cit...
It doesn't matter if it's a stadium, a hospital or a subway.
I guess it would be comparable to countries trying to attract businesses by giving them tax breaks?
https://fortune.com/2020/08/23/amazon-coronavirus-taxes-loca...
The bit about "paying to destroy mainstreet" is of course nonsense. Amazon's business would exist either way.
This article is about the US, all the references and the article it self point to that.
Do not rope in international cities where sporting events have different impacts and are potentially funded differently. Thank you. :)
The stadium isn't even located in the city of Buffalo but well outside of it.
If ~nobody is mentioning, let alone discussing, the actual priorities of a large fraction of the voters, then rational public policy outcomes may prove rather rare.
The combination of brazen lies about costs, and deep "nobody mentions that" motivations are the big problem with the stadiums.
Also are cities really investing in something better?
Oakland lost both Raiders and Warriors. It seems like Oakland spend that money on pension benefits of city employees. And they started laying off teachers. If you ask me: if you cannot spend money on schools (or anything useful) build a stadium.
But this is politic: stadiums are easy target but do know that city will probably mismanage the money any way.
I’m just explaining how dynamic goes here: the cities will be still be funding stadiums because electorate will not trust them when they say “we will spend on x”.
Peak populism.
I don't think that that is true anymore. It used to be, but sports is competing for eyeballs with all the other entertainment out there.
Yeah, sure, sports had a large audience when people did not have games, instant messaging, social sites, Netflix, AmzPrime, Hulu and more in the palm of their hands.
Basically, sports is in competition with all the other forms of entertainment. I'm looking around my circle of friends, family and acquaintances, and the only ones who are interested are:
1. Those with children on some team in school, and then they're only interested in that particular sport, and only when their children's teams are playing.
2. The older folk who were supporters all their lives, and will continue being supporters.
3. The people betting on matches.
I know of only one family that actually is into sport, and regularly follows all the soccer and/or cricket matches that come around. The others have cancelled their sat-tv and just use netflix, amz-prime and the internet for entertainment.
In 2021, 95 of the top 100 most-watched TV broadcasts in the US were sports. More people watched the Raiders play on Thanksgiving than watched the presidential inauguration.
1. https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2022/01...
Sure, the final event of a season always has a large number of viewers (1 in 3, according to your stats), just like any other special event, but
a) We aren't looking at only the outliers (I would guess an average soapie episode has more viewers than an average match)
b) A single sporting event that has $FOO million viewers does not mean that $FOO million people are following the sport. My experience is that there are large media campaigns to get people to tune in for the large events. They tune out again once the event is over.
Very few of these are special events; most of the games on this list are roughly the equivalent of, like, an Everton-Burnley match on a random Tuesday in February. Imagine if that match drew more viewers than the Eurovision final - that is the level of dominance that sports have over the American entertainment landscape.
There’s a reason Amazon is paying the NFL $1 billion per year for a single weekly game package.
> we're comparing stadium visitors with the draw of netflix, social media, games, etc.
Even on this basis, it’s clear that sports are still thriving. Once this NBA season is over, total attendance for the 2021-22 MLB, NFL, and NBA seasons is likely going to be ~90 million. Obviously many people go more than once, but still: 90 million people through the gates in one year, and that doesn’t even include the NHL or college football.
It’s also worth pointing out that two of the top five and three of the top 15 best-selling video games in 2021 were sports games licensed by those three leagues.
There is for every city to decide if funding some private business is in the interest of its inhabitants or not.
Fast forward 10 (ish) years to 2022 the floated value of a new stadium is looking to be between 1.4-1.8B to mirror the other stadiums build in the state in NYC (can't off hand remember which ones are new). The average is about 1.6% paid out of local / state taxes, while it seems (perception) that the state is willing to pay an unprecedented 25-50% of the new stadium from local coffers.
I'm not sure if anyone has looked around, but in the last two years I think the population dropped by 300K in NYS and Upstate (everything East of Rochester) and Western New York (everything Rochester and west) has been dying slowly.
I think Buffalo has seen a mediocre rise back to glory under the "Billion to Buffalo" under Cuomo's governance, but tons of that left the state with Tesla's Riverbend plant and honestly real failure to deliver on its promises. The rest went to our startup and industrial technology companies with sprinkles into our medical institutions (our real meat and po-tats around these parts).
The problem is - we have no money. Taxes are high (without blaming a party, but a culture problem in NYS) and social programs are abused. Billions in the pocket of the wealthy need to be spent and the local pockets need to contribute to their profits vs. being blead for them.
Really hate living in a state that just hates business like we do here, but .. this what you get. Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo will all eventually fail on some level because of the continued regime's need to keep the status going.
Someone really needs to speak truth to power, or its going to crush our country economically as capitalism is more oligarch feeling than Representative Democracy.
Readability is dead.
And I couldn't agree more with a lot of it. I think the "What Can Be Done?" section is really good. I think there should be federal incentives for forcing cities to work together on their contracts with these sports teams to make their deals more fair. I don't know how that would work?
But, for example, one of the downsides listed in the article is that most of the jobs created by the stadium are low-paying jobs. Not just the construction work itself but maintaining the stadium. Janitors, cashiers, mechanics, etc. But that's not an issue /with the stadium itself/ that's an issue with ALL of the country itself. It's not like the stadium not being there is going to give janitors higher paying jobs. Whether they work low-paying and hardly livable jobs for the stadium or for a contractor that has deals with Google doesn't make a difference. It's al ow paying job that can't sustain a living wage. That's not on the stadium. That's not on the city making a deal with NFL. That's an irrelevant point. If you want to make those 10,000 stadium jobs better for the community, don't choose to NOT put a stadium there. Choose to increase the quality of life for the residents of the city.
But, I think what taints my perspective more than anything is being from Chicago and having lived in Texas. I know of people that are proud of being Chicagoans, that love going to Wrigleyville, that love being from the North/South based on what team they follow. I know of people in Texas that are proud of their town because of how good their football team was. I know of people who went to A&M because of its sports teams. I know of people who travel there specifically to watch a game. I've seen content from their Fightin' Texas Aggie Band that's made me feel inspired.
I think part of it IS economic and I know I'm biased towards success stories. But I do think there absolutely is an emotional component to it. And if you think a government shouldn't be making emotional decisions, that's totally fine. I don't disagree with you at all. I wish I could agree with you harder, actually. I just can't put myself completely in the camp of "cities should not pay for new stadiums."